Close to 1 million waterfowl spend their winters in the Chesapeake Bay, providing recreational hunting and bird watching for locals and visitors. But the call for construction of wind farms of more than 100 turbines about 10 miles offshore presented a question scientists could not answer: Will the turbines affect the birds?
With funding from the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, scientists at Patuxent Wildlife Refuge Center are pioneering studies to understand the lifestyle of East Coast sea ducks to try to answer this question.
The seaduck project will amass about four years of data on the birds' migration patterns, Woehr said. He does not expect that scientists will find that the birds fly far enough off shore to be impacted by wind farms, but will not know until results are compiled.
Though the number of ducks on the eastern seaboard is unknown, their populations have declined, Berlin and Therrien said.
If wind farms are built in their migration route, it could increase stressors the ducks face.
"If they have to fly around one farm, that's not a big deal," Therrien said. "But say there's wind farms up and down the coast. … It could be another factor that will add to the physiological stress of the birds" and increase mortality.
We've seen before that wind power installations have serious problems with bird and bat mortality. Will ducks spell the end of Gov. O'Malley's plans for wind power in Maryland?
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